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Éamon de Valera: A Will To Power
by Ronan FanningRonan Fanning offers a reappraisal of the most famous, and most divisive, political figure in modern Irish history, reconciling Éamon de Valera’s shortcomings with a recognition of his achievement as the statesman who embodied Irish independence and spared the nation decades of unproductive debate on the pros and cons of remaining tied to Britain.
Fire and Ashes: Success and Failure in Politics
by Michael IgnatieffIn 2005 Michael Ignatieff left Harvard to lead Canada's Liberal Party and by 2008 was poised to become Prime Minister. It never happened. He describes what he learned from his bruising defeat about compromise and the necessity of bridging differences in a pluralist society. A reflective, compelling account of modern politics as it really is.
The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From The Sublime And Beautiful To American Independence
by David BromwichThis biography of statesman Edmund Burke (1729-1797), covering three decades, is the first to attend to the complexity of Burke's thought as it emerges in both the major writings and private correspondence. David Bromwich reads Burke's career as an imperfect attempt to organize an honorable life in the dense medium he knew politics to be.
Writing Was Everything (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures In The History Of American Civilization Ser. #Vol. 1994)
by Alfred KazinA deft blend of autobiography, history, and criticism, Writing Was Everything emerges as a reaffirmation of literature in an age of deconstruction and critical dogma. It stands as clear testimony to Kazin's belief that "literature is not theory but, at best, the value we can give to our experience, which in our century has been and remains beyond the imagination of mankind."
Inside Captive, Indian King: Peter Williamson in America and Britain
by Timothy J. ShannonIn 1758 Peter Williamson, dressed as an Indian, peddled a tale in Scotland about being kidnapped as a young boy, sold into slavery and servitude, captured by Indians, and made a prisoner of war. Separating fact from fiction, Timothy Shannon illuminates the curiosity about America among working-class people on the margins of empire.
Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman
by Paul Avrich Karen AvrichIn 1889 Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman met in a Lower East Side coffee shop. Over the next fifty years they became fast friends, fleeting lovers, and loyal comrades. This dual biography offers a glimpse into their intertwined lives, the influence of the anarchist movement they shaped, and their unyielding commitment to equality and justice.
Declaring His Genius: Oscar Wilde in North America
by Roy Morris Jr.Arriving at the port of New York in 1882, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde quipped he had “nothing to declare but my genius.” But as this sparkling narrative reveals, Wilde was, rarely for him, underselling himself. A chronicle of his sensational eleven-month speaking tour of America, Declaring His Genius offers an indelible portrait of both Oscar Wilde and the Gilded Age. Neither Wilde nor America would ever be the same.
Redeeming the Great Emancipator (The Nathan I. Huggins lectures #15)
by Allen C. GuelzoAbraham Lincoln projects a larger-than-life image across American history owing to his role as the Great Emancipator. Yet this noble aspect of Lincoln’s identity is the dimension that some historians have cast into doubt. The award-winning historian and Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo offers a vigorous defense of America’s sixteenth president.
Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic
by Charles N. EdelAmerica’s rise from revolutionary colonies to a world power is often treated as inevitable. But Charles N. Edel’s provocative biography of John Q. Adams argues that he served as the central architect of a grand strategy whose ideas and policies made him a critical link between the founding generation and the Civil War–era nation of Lincoln.
Machiavelli: A Portrait
by Christopher CelenzaThe man whose name is shorthand for all that is ugly in politics was more nuanced than his reputation suggests. Christopher Celenza’s portrait of Machiavelli removes the varnish to reveal not just the hardnosed philosopher but the skilled diplomat, learned commentator on ancient history, comic playwright, tireless letter writer, and thwarted lover.
Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens
by David StuttardAlcibiades was one of the most dazzling figures of the Golden Age of Athens. A ward of Pericles and a friend of Socrates, he was spectacularly rich, bewitchingly handsome and charismatic, a skilled general, and a ruthless politician. He was also a serial traitor, infamous for his dizzying changes of loyalty in the Peloponnesian War. Nemesis tells the story of this extraordinary life and the turbulent world that Alcibiades set out to conquer. David Stuttard recreates ancient Athens at the height of its glory as he follows Alcibiades from childhood to political power. Outraged by Alcibiades’ celebrity lifestyle, his enemies sought every chance to undermine him. Eventually, facing a capital charge of impiety, Alcibiades escaped to the enemy, Sparta. There he traded military intelligence for safety until, suspected of seducing a Spartan queen, he was forced to flee again—this time to Greece’s long-term foes, the Persians. Miraculously, though, he engineered a recall to Athens as Supreme Commander, but—suffering a reversal—he took flight to Thrace, where he lived as a warlord. At last in Anatolia, tracked by his enemies, he died naked and alone in a hail of arrows. As he follows Alcibiades’ journeys crisscrossing the Mediterranean from mainland Greece to Syracuse, Sardis, and Byzantium, Stuttard weaves together the threads of Alcibiades’ adventures against a backdrop of cultural splendor and international chaos. Navigating often contradictory evidence, Nemesis provides a coherent and spellbinding account of a life that has gripped historians, storytellers, and artists for more than two thousand years.
Orpheus in the Marketplace: Jacpoo Peri and the Economy of Late Renaissance Florence (I Tatti studies in Italian Renaissance history #10)
by Tim CarterThe Florentine musician Jacopo Peri (1561-1633) is known as the composer of the first operas--they include the earliest to survive complete, Euridice (1600), in which Peri sang the role of Orpheus. The recent discovery of a large number of private account books belonging to him and his family allows for a greater exploration of Peri's professional and personal life. Richard Goldthwaite, an economic historian, and Tim Carter, a musicologist, have done more, however, than write a biography: their investigation exposes the value of such financial documents as a primary source for an entire period. This record of Peri's wide-ranging investments and activities in the marketplace enables the first detailed account of the Florentine economy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and opens a new perspective on one of Europe's principal centers of capitalism. His economic circumstances reflect continuities and transformations in Florentine society, and the strategies for negotiating them, under the Medici grand dukes. They also allow a reevaluation of Peri the singer and composer that elucidates the cultural life of a major artistic center even in changing times, providing a quite different view of what it meant to be a musician in late Renaissance Italy.
Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (The Nathan I. Huggins lectures #13)
by Robin D. KelleyThis collective biography of four jazz musicians from Brooklyn, Ghana, and South Africa demonstrates how modern Africa reshaped jazz, how modern jazz helped form a new African identity, and how musical convergences and crossings altered the politics and culture of both continents.
Ashoka in Ancient India
by Nayanjot LahiriIn the third century BCE Ashoka ruled in South Asia and Afghanistan, and came to be seen as the ideal Buddhist king. Disentangling the threads of Ashoka’s life from the knot of legend that surrounds it, Nayanjot Lahiri presents a vivid biography of an emperor whose legacy extends far beyond the bounds of his lifetime and dominion.
The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination
by Fiona MacCarthyIn Fiona MacCarthy’s riveting account, Burne-Jones’s exchange of faith for art places him at the intersection of the nineteenth century and the Modern, as he leads us forward from Victorian mores and attitudes to the psychological, sexual, and artistic audacity that would characterize the early twentieth century.
The Lius of Shanghai
by Sherman CochranFrom the Sino-Japanese War to the Communist Revolution, a cache of letters from one of China’s prominent families, the Lius of Shanghai, sheds light on a tumultuous era. Sherman Cochran and Andrew Hsieh show how the family confronted war, civil unrest, and social upheaval, and how—in the midst of it all—they built a vast business empire.
Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections On Memory And Imagination
by Otto Dov KulkaIn a life dedicated to studying and writing about Nazism and the Holocaust, Otto Dov Kulka has set to one side his experiences as a child inmate at Auschwitz. Breaking years of silence, Kulka brings together the personal and historical in a devastating, at times poetic, account of the concentration camps and the private mythology he constructed.
Africans in the Old South: Mapping Exceptional Lives Across The Atlantic World
by Randy J. SparksThe Atlantic slave trade was the largest forced migration in history, yet most of its stories are lost. Randy Sparks examines the few remaining reconstructed experiences of West Africans who lived in the South between 1740 and 1860. Their stories highlight the diversity of struggles that confronted every African who arrived on American shores.
Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years
by Nicholas FrankelNicholas Frankel presents a revisionary account of Oscar Wilde’s final years, spent in poverty and exile in Europe following his release from an English prison for the crime of gross indecency between men. Despite repeated setbacks and open hostility, Wilde—unapologetic and even defiant—attempted to rebuild himself as a man, and a man of letters.
Flaubert
by Michel WinockMichel Winock situates Flaubert in France’s century of great democratic transition. Wary of the masses, Flaubert rejected universal suffrage, but above all he hated the vulgar, ignorant bourgeoisie, a class that embodied every vice of the democratic age. His loathing became a fixation—and a source of literary inspiration.
The Devil's Wall: The Nationalist Youth Mission Of Heinz Rutha
by Mark CornwallHeinz Rutha, pioneer of a youth movement that emphasized male bonding in its quest to reassert German dominance over Czechoslovakia, was arrested in 1937 for corrupting male adolescents. This led to an international scandal. Cornwall’s biography is the first to tackle the long-taboo intersection of youth, homosexuality, and fascist nationalism.
The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 1
by Robert FrostPensive, mercurial, and often funny, the private Robert Frost remains less appreciated than the public poet. The Letters of Robert Frost, the first major edition of the correspondence of this complex and subtle verbal artist, includes hundreds of unpublished letters whose literary interest is on a par with Dickinson, Lowell, and Beckett.
Spartacus (Revealing Antiquity Ser. #19)
by Aldo SchiavoneThe slave and gladiator Spartacus has been the subject of myth-making in his own time and of movie-making in ours. Aldo Schiavone brings him squarely into the arena of serious history. Spartacus emerges here as the commander of an army, whose aim was to incite Italy to revolt against Rome and to strike at the very heart of the imperial system.
Spartacus (Revealing Antiquity Ser. #19)
by Aldo SchiavoneThe slave and gladiator Spartacus has been the subject of myth-making in his own time and of movie-making in ours. Aldo Schiavone brings him squarely into the arena of serious history. Spartacus emerges here as the commander of an army, whose aim was to incite Italy to revolt against Rome and to strike at the very heart of the imperial system.
Nuclear Forces: The Making of the Physicist Hans Bethe
by Silvan S. SchweberWhat drove Nobel-winning physicist Hans Bethe, head of Theoretical Physics at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, to later renounce the weaponry he had worked so tirelessly to create? That is one of the questions answered by Nuclear Forces, a riveting biography of Bethe’s early life and development as both a scientist and a man of principle.